Last Sunday, I had some time to kill till the English premier league weekend action started. I picked up this book from the book shelf and started skimming it again.

The book is about a young boy in India named Govind, who along with two of his best friends Ish and Omi, opens a cricket shop. The story goes on to explain everything they face in their life: love, politics, religion, success, failure and so on.

If you have free time, read this book (non-affliate link). It is a good story and there are many hidden lessons too.

Talking about hidden lessons, this post is about what 3 mistakes of my life teach you about selling. And no, I won’t give away the story. So you don’t have to worry.

Before I begin, some of what you are going to read might already be known to you. If you have been selling products or services for quite some time, you will find a couple of new points and some known fundamentals. But if you are completely new to selling, you will learn a lot in this post. Keep reading.

Now, let’s take a look at what you could learn about selling from the book. I have listed the key 10 lessons about selling:

1. Sell what people want

In the story, the three young boys open a cricket shop and sell cricket equipments. In India, cricket is the most popular sport. Every kid, as soon as he starts to walk, grabs a cricket bat and starts to play. And in the district these guys lived, there weren’t any good local shop that sold cricketing equipments. So it is very obvious that they decided to sell those.

You can sell your product only if there is a need for it. Before you start putting in hard work to create a product, analyze the market for the needs of people. The product that solves the problems of people will almost always sell well.

So whatever niche you are in, search all the places where people talk about your niche and find the most common problems and needs. Then create a product to solve the problem.

2. Be passionate about what you are selling

The guys in the story were complete cricket addicts, just like millions of other people in India. But they knew more than an average cricket fan. They were so passionate about the game that they would even go for a fight when someone disturbs them during a game on TV (an incident detailed at the start of the story).

In order to sell a lot of products, you need to be passionate about what you are selling. You should know more than your average customer about the topic. If your product teaches how to get a six pack ab in three months, you should know more about the exercises and the effects more than your customers.

When you are selling something, you should expect a lot of questions from your customers. Unless you are passionate about your niche, you will find it difficult to answer your customer’s queries.

You can outsource the work of answering questions, but surely it won’t help you in the long term.

3. Give free information

Out of the three guys, Ish is extremely knowledgeable about cricket and he is also a school level player. Anyone who came to buy equipments got free advice. Ish would teach them how to grip the ball when bowling and what is a perfect stance when you are batting. These kind of advice made everyone in that place, buy from these guys’ shop.

This is another reason why should know more than your average customer. People love free information. It helps you build trust. You start to build a connection with your customers. These are clearly evident when you see top bloggers sell so many copies of their books or ebooks or even membership programs using their blog alone. They get the rewards for offering solid content for free over a long period of time.

4. Do Cross-Selling

Cross-selling is a technique where the seller usually offers something related to a product the buyer is buying or has just bought.

The boys were smart, especially Govind. He always had innovative ideas to improve their business. In fact, the idea of opening a shop was Govind’s. He had everything a good entrepreneur should have. He also knew how to cross-sell.

Cross-selling is totally fine if you do it the right way. If you over do it or do it wrongly, your customers might get frustrated. But it often never happens.

The best thing about cross selling is that it is easier to sell a related product to a customer since they already have interest in the product. At the same time, it also makes them happy because they would have otherwise not found the products you just cross sold to them. How many times have you decided to buy something from Amazon and ended up buying more than what you decided? I have been there many times myself. I decide to buy a book but end up buying one or more related books. And the important this is, I feel happy for buying the extra books as it is very useful to me.

Image Source: discounts by TheTruthAbout…

5. Give deep discounts

Govind knew that if he gave discounts, people would buy more. The parents in the district would buy equipments for their kids whenever there was a discount on products.

You always see in day-to-day life, companies giving discount on their products for short period of time. If you are giving a discount, make sure you do these three things:

# Offer only for a short period of time
# Give a good reason for why you are offering the discount
# Make the offer irresistible

Bloggers do this all the time when they sell their books. You can offer discount for Christmas or for reaching a milestone like 10,000 sales etc.

6. Make use of trends

As I said before, Govind is a really smart guy in the story. He is innovative and can spot a trend. In cricket, when a player performs well, it is obvious that equipments related to that player will sell more.

Likewise in your business, spot the trends. Check out sites like Google Insights to find what is trending and try to make best use of it. Products based on these trends will perform much better than the normal ones.

7. Invest to grow

In the story, a conversation between Govind and his mother (who also runs a small business) goes like this:

‘If I have a good *Diwali season, I will get you a colour TV,’ mom vowed.

‘No need,’ I said. I removed my shoes to get ready for a shower, ‘you need a bigger grinder urgently, the small one is all wobbly’

‘I will buy the TV if only the business makes extra money,’ she said.

‘No. If you make extra money, put it back in the business. Don’t buy useless things. I can always see the match in colour in Ishaan’s house’.

*Diwali is a popular festival in India, also known as festival of lights.

Every month, calculate your profits and fix a certain percentage of it to invest back into business. I know a friend who invests one-third of the profits back into his business.

You can invest money back into business to achieve many things. It can be to improve customer service or outsource work or even buy niche related books to improve your knowledge and stay up-to-date.

8. Be prepared to face failure

Govind, Ish and Omi faced failure a couple of times. They started the business by opening a shop in a temple. Later they rent a shop in a mall. This mall, before they move over, gets destructed by the Gujarat earthquake.

Similarly, in your business, you have to be prepared to face failure. It might not be in the form of destruction. It could be no sale for 15 straight days or it could be your site going down just on the launch day. It happens. You have to accept it and live with it.

Image Source: It’s a long time to grow young by nattu

9. Everything Starts Small

The guys start in a small temple and have very few sales every day. They never really made any profit in the first month. But as they kept on working hard, they started to see results.

Everything starts small. You cannot expect a million dollar day in sales if you are just starting. John Reese didn’t achieve the million-dollar-day with his first product. You will make only a few sales at the beginning but don’t worry. As time goes on, you will start making more sales. Surely you’ll have more sales for your second product than the first (as long as it is at least equally good) or you will even see more sales of your first product as you work on your brand.

10. Delegate Work

Govind does a brilliant job in delegating work. He knows the positives of each of the three guys. He knows he is good at marketing and he takes care of all the marketing work. Ish is really good in cricket and has played for his school team. So obviously he is the one who knows a lot about the game and can offer a lot of tips for his customers. Omi is a guy who does the physical work well. They all perform only those works which they are good at.

If you are not good at copywriting, you will be better off hiring a professional copywriter. You could also hire someone to do the design work for the product. Delegating work gives you more free time to do what you are good at and also results in a better end product.

3 mistakes of my life is a really good book and it has many other hidden lessons. As I said before, if you have time, try to find a copy of this book and give it a read. Chetan Bhagat explains a lot about India and the story is also quite good.

These 10 lessons about selling are important for success. Do you agree with these? Do you have any other fundamental selling tip that you feel to be very important for success as a seller? Please share your views in the comments. And also let me know if you have any questions.

The joy of doing what you love and getting paid is second to none. Really. Think about it. Do you love to write about productivity? Have you been following a club from your early age and want to express your opinion? Love designing? Are you skilled in marketing and advertising? The best thing is that you can do these and get paid for it.

That is the job of a freelancer. You get paid to do what you love.

Image Source: i_do_graphics by Brent Nelson

Okay. You have decided to become a freelancer. So the next question that pops into our mind is “How do you get clients?”

I’m giving you three tips that you can act on right now and get a client within a week. That’s a guarantee if you really do what I say and do it well.

1. Guest Post

This is the best method. I don’t understand why people don’t rate guest blogging. It should be on top of their list if they need to get clients.

Of course, there are other uses to guest blogging.

How do you get clients by guest blogging?

Find a blog in your niche. When I say your niche, I mean the one that will suit you the best.

Are you a copywriter? You can write a guest post at Copyblogger.

At the end of the post, in the author byline, promote your service.

“XYZ is a blogger at ABC.Com and a freelance writer. You can see his sample works here. If you are hiring him, say “123 blog referred you” to get 20% off.”

Replace XYZ with your name, ABC.Com with your blog url and “123 blog” with the blog where you are guest posting.

By the way, this is how I got started.

2. Forums

Most people don’t visit forums when they need to find a job. The thing is there are quite a lot of job availabilities advertised in forums but very less takers.

Go to Warrior Forum and you will see thousands of marketers who are in need of a writer or designer. In warrior forum, you pay $20 to post about your service. But trust me, if you promote your service properly, you will get a lot of work. Lot more than you can handle.

The pay that you get for your work might be less but for starters it is a great place. Why not charge a couple of dollars when you are starting out instead of doing work for free to get testimonials?

If you are short of money, then you should read this lengthy post that I wrote about getting freelance work using forums at Freelance Folder. You can read it here.

3. Video Marketing

Video marketing is the next big thing. Or it already is. You have inspiration in the form of Gary Vaynerchuk for video marketing. When a person can build a huge business using video marketing, of course after a lot of hard work, you should be able to get a job using video marketing. Although I haven’t tried this, I know people who have done it successfully. I might give it a try in future.

Create a video explaining about yourself and your service. Post it on every video site. The only negative about this method is that you might get a lot of negative comments. If you are a person who doesn’t mind that (just like me), surely this method is for you.

Tip: Try to add humor. This video might help you with that. (:P)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let me know what you think about these methods in the comments. Once you have done that, take action right now. Any one method will do. Sit down and think which method will suit you the best and go for it.

This blog post is inspired by the post over at Freelance Folder written by Laura Spencer on Five Ways to Start a Freelance Business Right Now. Make sure you read that too. The points in that post are completely different.

Let’s talk about the latest wordtracker keyword questions tool. The free wordtracker keyword questions tool helps you to find questions related to the keywords that you enter. If your keyword is weight loss, you will see questions that people search for. See the below image which shows you the questions for the keyword weight loss (They are number of searches per day).

You get more results than what is shown above.

So how can you use the free wordtracker keyword question tool to earn money?

Here are the top 3 ways you can earn money using the tool:

1. Blogging
There are always times when you don’t have anything to write about. At these times, go to the keyword tool and search for a keyword that is related to your niche. If your niche is personal development, don’t enter personal development. It won’t help you in anyway. Search for a much clearer term. If I’m a personal development blogger, I would search for something like “exercise” which is clearer. Once you have found a couple of good keywords, you can write articles and post them to your blog. Search engine traffic is the best when you want to earn money. Using this tool properly, you can get ore search engine visitors to your blog and as a result, earn more money.

2. Create A Product
Once you know what people are asking, it is easy to create a product. When you are creating a product, the first thing you want to check is, whether there is a buying market. Since you have found out that people are asking questions and need help, your product have a high chance of doing well. For blog posts, you should go for less competitive terms while for creating products, you can go with search terms with more competition. Products tend to rank well in spite of the competition.

3. Article marketing And Squidoo
If you don’t have a popular blog or if you want to write articles in different niches, you should go for article marketing. I talked about the benefits of article marketing in the blog post I wrote the past week at Blogging Tips. Article marketing and squidoo can be used to earn money. Choose a good affiliate product for the topic you are writing articles on. Join as an affiliate and promote the product in the articles you have written or in the squidoo lenses you have created.
Have you been using the keyword tool already? How are you going to use the tool to earn money?

P.S: I will write a follow up post on how you can find the best products to promote. It will reveal the same methods that I use to find the best affiliate products. Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog so that you will not miss the article.